There’s no use going to school unless your destination is the library—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

In his book Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests that the future of democratic societies depends not only on shared values but on shared spaces: The libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed.[1] The title of his book is taken from Andrew Carnegie’s description of the thousands of libraries that he had built and funded. At the turn of the 20^th century, Carnegie, then the richest person in the world, sponsored the building of 1,689 public libraries and more than 100 academic libraries in the U.S., 660 in Britain, and many more throughout the Commonwealth. A century later, Bill and Melinda Gates picked up the same philanthropic torch with the creation of the Gates Library Foundation in 1997, which has provided grants to more than 5,800 libraries in the U.S. and Canada earmarked for increasing bandwidth and digital content.

While it may seem surprising that print has survived (and continues to thrive) with little change for more than 600 years, the library’s enduring presence speaks volumes about our cultural values. At least 3000 years before Gutenberg’s printing press made the replication of books possible, Eastern and Western societies have had libraries of one kind or another. From the Latin libarius, meaning relating to books, libraries have been iconic cultural structures from ancient through modern times, literally pillars of our civilization and as indispensable to our towns and cities as schools and fire stations. Serving as a permanent place for organizing, collecting, sharing, and storing documents, books, and even tablets (stone, not electronic), the library has not strayed far from its original mission over the centuries. While its main function as a repository of knowledge and a communal hub for learning has not changed, the library has evolved to embrace technology, providing patrons free access to seminal scholarly, literary, and creative digital works. We can say with certainty that technology has not made the library obsolete but has empowered it to become an essential influencer, curator, and knowledge provider in the digital age. The library may be more relevant today than it has ever been.

A decade ago, I served briefly on the board of a local university that was in the process of building a new library in the center of the university’s quad. It was designed to be a high-tech showpiece for learning and collaboration with a major initiative to digitize the university’s proprietary, scholarly documents collection. During a discussion concerning the name for the library, one board member questioned why we should continue to use the name “library” if the intention had been to phase out physical books. He suggested calling it a media or knowledge center. In fact, the objective was to add digital books to the collection, not de-emphasize or halt the acquisition of physical books—the architectural plans for the new building had allotted enough shelf space for the university’s current collection as well as additional room for future acquisitions. (In all fairness, though, space for physical books is a problem for all libraries and one reason why they are ramping up their e-book collections.) Looking back at it today, “library” was the right moniker—and given its longevity, probably always will be. With apologies to Shakespeare, books by any other name would mean the same.

Total product acquisition in all three primary library segments—public, school, and academic—still tilts in favor of physical books, but with greater annual increases in spending for e-books. We do find, however, variations in buying behaviors among the three segments due to differences in budget size and constituent priorities.

In 2019, roughly 60% of total collection expenditures in the public libraries in the U.S. were devoted to printed books and 20% for electronic materials, including e-books, audiobooks, e-serials (journals), database licenses, reference tools, musical scores, maps or photos in digital formats, as well as materials digitized by the library and held both locally and remotely for which permanent or temporary access rights have been acquired; and another 20% for “other materials,” such as microform, audio CDs, video, and DVDs. Except for audio files, these formats, often described as “new materials,” have become mostly obsolete. The acquisition of digital content has been growing faster than physical content, but public libraries have been building their e-book collections in earnest for only a little over a decade.[2] On average, there is a 70/30 split between physical and digital formats with trends in annual budgets that are gradually closing the gap in spending differences between the two.

We find a similar trend in school libraries, where e-book purchases are increasing at a higher rate than physical books and represent approximately 35% of their budgets. The amount of funds that schools devote to purchasing or subscribing to digital products and online websites correlates with the time students spend with technology-driven learning tools. Classroom and study time with online content has been increasing over the years and represents roughly 30% to 35% of students’ total study time. The 2020 pandemic caused a sudden and dramatic shift to digital learning solutions, which will likely result in an even greater role for online learning once schools reestablish in-building teaching. So as not to return to the way things were prior to the pandemic, school reform advocates are pressing for more online and remote learning to become permanent parts of the daily curriculum, making greater use of blended learning, and flipped classrooms.[3]

At academic libraries, we find a proportionately greater use of technology than in either the public or school sectors, which corresponds to the ubiquitous use of technology in college and university classes. Of the approximately $2.8 billion that academic libraries spent in 2019 on information resources, half of those expenditures were for current electronic serial subscriptions. In one recent report on the purchasing patterns in academic libraries, “expenditures made for print books obtained on a one-time, title-by-title basis decreased year to year, while e-book expenditures obtained in the same way experienced a net increase.”[4]

[1] Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018).

[2] According to the U.S. Government Publishing Office’s (GPO) website, Government Book Talk! in 2009 Sony linked their e-reader with libraries that had adopted Overdrive’s digital network, one of the first to enable library patrons to borrow e-books directly from their local library.

[3] A flipped classroom is a kind of blended learning—partly online and partly in the classroom—where the student first studies the topic at home and problem-solves and collaborates in the classroom.

[4] Daniel, Katherine, Joseph J. Esposito, and Roger C. Schonfel. “Library Acquisition Patterns.” Ithaka S+R. Last Modified 29 January 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.310937.